Birkin and Ursula come back for Gerald's funeral. Birkin does some soliloquising, the burden of which is “He should have loved me. I offered him.” He is sure Gerald would have been happy if he had accepted. When Ursula wants to know if she is not enough for him, he says,
“No, to make life complete, really complete, I wanted eternal union with a man too, another kind of love.”
“It is a perversity,” she said.
“Well——,” he said.
“You can't have two kinds of love. Why should you?” she said.
“It seems as if I can't,” he said. “Yet I wanted it.”
“You can't have it because it's wrong, impossible,” she said.
“I don't believe that,” he answered.
And that is the unvarying and final answer of the advocates of the enigmatic aberration whose doctrines Mr. Lawrence is trying to foist upon an unsuspecting English-reading public.
In “Aaron's Rod” Mr. Lawrence returns to the theme of “The Rainbow” and “Women in Love.” His ardour, fortunately, has cooled somewhat, but his psychology is more at variance with facts and his philosophy more mystic than in either of these. Aaron Sisson, a miner's checkweighman, with a talent for music, marries when twenty, an over-sexed young woman of better social position than himself. Though he soon betrays her, they manage to live, with their three children, an average family life for twelve years. He then determines that he will not be the instrument and furnisher of any woman. He rebels against the sacrament by which we live today; namely, that man is the giver, woman the receiver. He can not and will not tolerate the life centrality of woman. Man's contact with woman should be for procreational purposes, but man should blend his spirit with man: “Born in him was a spirit which could not worship woman, and would not.”